Iktinos
Iktinos designed the Parthenon together with Kallikrates and wrote a book on the temple that has since been lost. He is also credited with the Temple of Apollo at Bassae, where the Corinthian column appears for the first time.
We know very little about Iktinos’ life. He was active in Athens in the 5th century BC, the period when Pericles led the city and had the Acropolis rebuilt after the Persians destroyed it in 480 BC. His birthplace, date of birth and training are all unknown. Greek architects usually learned their trade in practice, working on large temple projects where knowledge of proportion, stone-cutting and lifting techniques was passed down from older masters to younger ones. That he was commissioned to design the city’s most important temple shows that he was already a recognised master builder by around 450 BC. Most of what we know about him comes from later ancient writers such as Plutarch, Vitruvius and Pausanias.
His principal work is the Parthenon on the Acropolis, built in 447–432 BC together with Kallikrates, while the sculptor Phidias directed the sculptural decoration. The temple is Doric but has Ionic elements, including a continuous frieze around the cella. It is famous for its optical refinements: the platform curves gently upwards, and the columns lean slightly inwards and have a soft swelling, entasis, so that the building does not look rigid. Together with a certain Karpion, Iktinos wrote a book on the temple that has been lost. Pausanias also attributes to him the Temple of Apollo at Bassae, which had the earliest known Corinthian capital, and he is associated with the Telesterion, the hall of the Mysteries at Eleusis.
Already in antiquity the Parthenon became a yardstick of perfect architecture, and since the 18th century it has been regarded as the very image of classical building. When travellers such as James Stuart and Nicholas Revett measured the monuments of Athens and published them from 1762 onwards, Europe gained accurate images of the Greek Doric order for the first time, which gave rise to Greek Revival neoclassicism. The Parthenon frieze, much of which was taken to London in the early 19th century, became a model for artists and architects. In the Nordic countries the legacy can be seen in temple fronts from the Gustavian period and in the Nordic Classicism of the 1920s, when architects such as Asplund studied the proportions of antiquity and learned from the Parthenon’s way of making simple forms seem alive.